María Berríos, curator of the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, in conversation with Eva Kernbauer

“The Crack begins within”. This is the title of the 11th Berlin Biennale held from 5 September to 1 November 2020 as the “epilogue” of a four-part program of “experiences” that started in fall 2019. Curated by María Berríos, Renata Cervetto, Lisette Lagnado and Agustín Pérez Rubio, it opened with a timely focus on the “beautiful rage” of art, its vulnerable resistance against violence, militarism and nationalism. The epilogue of the 11th Berlin Biennale was shown at four venues. María Berríos will talk us through the exhibition chapter “The Inverted Museum” presented at Martin Gropius Bau, with an inspiring series of artworks exploring colonialism, cultural identity, art looting, and the pitfalls of Western musealization. Presenting and discussing several artworks, she will offer a few glimpses into an exhibition few people from outside Berlin were able to see this year, talking about the exhibition's concept, the collaborative curatorial approach and the feat of staging a major international exhibition in the midst of a global pandemic. Please join us for the talk and discussions!

María Berríos (* 1978 Santiago de Chile) is a sociologist, writer, independent curator, and cofounder of the Chilean editorial collective vaticanochico. Her work traverses art, culture, and politics with a special interest in the collective experiments of the Third World movement and their exhibition formats in the 1960s and 70s. She teaches and lectures regularly in Europe and Latin America and has published extensively on art and politics in Latin America and beyond. Among other projects, Berríos curated with Lisette Lagnado Drifts and Derivations. Experiences, journeys and morphologies on experimental architectural collectives from Chile (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2010), and curated Nuestro desconocido, nuestro caos, nuestro mar (Museo Experimental el Eco, Mexico City, 2014), and Alberto Cruz: El cuerpo del arquitecto no es el de un solo hombre (together with Amalia Cross, MAVI – Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago de Chile, 2017).

Feel free to have a look at a video walkthrough of the exhibition at Gropius Bau here:

https://11.berlinbiennale.de/documentation/video-walkthrough-gropius-bau

and peruse María Berríos' inspiring text "Solidarity and Storytelling. Rumors against Enclosure”:

https://11.berlinbiennale.de/resources/maria-berrios-solidarity-and-storytelling-rumors-against-enclosure